Laravel is a powerful and versatile programming framework written in PHP. However, it doesn’t matter how great the technology your solutions are created in if they don’t answer your business’s and user’s needs or help you reach your strategic goals.
The good news is that Laravel is a technology that can do exactly that. We’ve put together a list of 14 features within the Laravel suite of technologies that can move you along your strategic roadmap.
Accelerate Value Delivery
Adopt MVC Architecture
Model-View-Controller (MVC) architecture patterns separate an application’s front end from the business logic and back-end processing. If only one element needs to be updated, these changes can be done quickly and without re-writing large portions of code. Laravel is designed to support MVC. If your apps aren’t already built to take advantage of this pattern, re-factoring them will give you better performance and accelerate your ability to deliver and manage code in the future.
Move to DevOps
DevOps makes delivering new functionality easier and more consistent with fewer issues. Laravel was built with testing and deploying in mind, facilitating both unit tests and robust automated testing that can support a continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipeline that is the hallmark of DevOps.
Upgrading Laravel
Newer versions of Laravel offer new and updated features and access to additional functionality. For instance, Route Caching in version 7 is as much as 2x faster than in v6. Laravel upgrades are sequential, however, and can require new packages or updates to related systems, like databases. An experienced Laravel partner can help you plan and execute a Laravel upgrade no matter how far back your versioning goes.
Template Engine
Laravel offers a templating engine called Blade. Blade templates offer features like inheritance, which accelerates page development by creating a structure for pages that are similar, and sections, so common elements can be re-used. This prevents development teams from having to re-write the same page elements over and over again.
Command Line Tools
Artisan is a built-in command-line tool that gives developers the ability to easily perform repetitive programming tasks that are typically done manually. It can be used to do things like create database structure or skeleton code. It also allows developers to create their own commands. This removes the need for developers to spend valuable project time on the same tasks repeatedly.
Improve Customer Experiences
Caching
Integrations with a caching backend create faster applications and a better user experience. Laravel provides support for popular cache backends like Redis and Memcached as part of the core system. Laravel even allows multiple cache configurations.
Queuing Service
Using queues in your web applications can better orchestrate responses from different processes. Laravel’s built-in queuing service provides a single API across backend queues so that time-consuming tasks can be deferred in favor of those that impact the user experience, like form responses.
Configure Error and Exception Handling
Logging can make finding issues that slow down an application easier and simplifies troubleshooting. Error and exception handling is configured with any new Laravel-based project. Also, knowing that logs can be challenging to look through, Laravel offers integrations with logging libraries and, by extension, log handlers that can streamline the process of spotting errors and anomalies.
Mail Service Integration
Today’s web users are technically savvy and have higher expectations of the applications that they use than ever before. Among those expectations are email notifications from the appropriate actions within your apps. Laravel includes an API for SwiftMailer, and drivers for SMTP, Amazon SES, PHP’s own “mail” function, and many more. This provides the user with seamless notification functionality without developers needing to spend hours writing new code.
Support Transformation and Modernization Initiatives
Move to Microservices
As part of their modernization and digital transformation efforts, many companies are shifting away from monolithic applications and moving to smaller, versatile, atomic microservices. Lumen is part of the Laravel Ecosystem and provides a lightweight and fast microservices framework.
Meet Organizational Mandates to Adopt APIs
APIs allow your organization to share data across the business, to leverage functionality from outside the company, and to create reusable components that enable rapid development of new features. Laravel fully supports API development in both SOAP and REST and facilitates authentication of APIs with Passport – a Laravel Ecosystem component that simplifies OAuth2 implementation.
Increase Security
Built-in oAuth2 Functionality
Authentication is important when connecting your applications securely to other providers, like social media sites. Laravel Socialite speeds the secure development of connections between your applications and sites like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google, GitHub, and more.
Throttling
Denial of Service attacks (DDoS) can take down your application or site and are caused by flooding an application with requests. Laravel includes rate-limiting middleware that can be applied to ports, IP addresses, routes, and more.
Prevent SQL Injections, Cross-Site Scripting, and Cross-Site Request Forgeries
Typically, securing an application against these common attack types is left up to the developer. Laravel’s security package removes cross-site scripting vulnerabilities in the codebase and includes cross-site request forgery protection within the framework, as well.
Laravel is an incredibly powerful and versatile development framework. But, at the end of the day, it is just that – a framework. And like any framework, if it’s not used to take advantage of what it does best, or put to work to address your needs, it can seem less appealing or useful. Aligning the strengths of Laravel with your company’s objectives will let you realize the power of the framework while making it easier to achieve your business goals.
